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Netbooks have already been evolving for your previous few of decades, and this MSI Wind U160 could be the most refined example from the breed we've observed however. MSI lent us a single with the slim,
Microsoft Office 2007 Key, light-weight, inexpensive bronze-colored baubles,
Windows 7, and we took it within the street for a week, testing its capacity to get genuine perform done to the go. The small Laptop aims to become a net-surfing, flexible netbook, and it nails it at a value that is way under the iPad.
At initial glance, this child is often a attractiveness. With its "Fancy Gold" color (we'd phone it much more of the classy-looking bronze), wispy two.2 pound pounds,
Windows 7 Ultimate, sharp ten.1-inch LED-backlit display, and cleanse lines,
Office Enterprise 2007, it is no wonder it won a product design and style award. Its pulchritude goes greater than skin deep, due to the fact its 1.66GHz Intel N450 Atom processor is simply quickly adequate to breeze through processor-intensive duties this kind of as Photoshop image editing and speech recognition.
That energy-efficient Atom processor is portion of Intel's next-generation Pine Path platform,
Office 2010 Activation, with MSI claiming an astonishing 15-hour battery life for this U160. With our constant use, that failed to look feasible except if we held the display dimmed way down and let it sleep a lot of the time, but we did get a good 7 to 8 hours' worth of use prior to the battery fizzled. Although which is less time than marketed, it is outstanding — long ample to get a day's operate done.
A highlight from the style is the seamless touchpad, blending itself into the laptop's surface with a pleasant nubby texture. And that 10-inch display, while at first seeming too small, is simply large adequate to get the job carried out, and its graphics performance smooth adequate to enjoy a movie or two within the plane. In fact, the size from the 10-inch display screen proved itself nearly perfect for a cramped airplane seat when that rube in front of me reclined his seatback into my lap.
The U160 as tested can be found for around $380, but there's a slight penalty for that rock-bottom cost: its Windows seven Starter operating system. Although it's not crippled to just three applications running at the same time as Microsoft originally announced — and it was pretty much like other versions of Windows seven — it wouldn't permit us change the desktop wallpaper. We found that annoying ample to go ahead and install a copy of Windows seven Ultimate, which ran like the wind. It is an aptly named notebook, indeed.
While we'd like to see more than the standard 1GB of RAM on board, that configuration still allowed us to run five or six apps at the same time with barely any slowdown. Even though this is really a very small laptop, its keyboard is almost the size of much larger notebooks, with keys that push down to a shallow depth but feel just right.
It's hard to believe you can get these a quality laptop for this kind of a low price. With its upgraded Intel N450 Atom processor, it can be just fast ample to get function completed around the road. Will you be able to do that with an iPad? Or would a $500 ASUS convertible netbook be a better candidate? Like the iPad, this MSI Wind U160 is excellent for viewing movies and browsing websites, but unlike the iPad, you can choose your browser. We'll compare the two side by side, but for now, we're digging the value and versatility of this gorgeous laptop.
Via MSI